Minecraft’s Steve has constantly been under pressure ever since he joined Smash Bros. due to his uniquely campy playstyle, combos, and almost limitless list of exclusive techniques. As the community continues debating his legality in tournament, one content creator continues to push the limits on what he can do.
Smash content creator Zach “WhyDo” Toner discovered and coined another new Steve technique on Sept. 28, known as the “Whivot.” By taking advantage of Steve’s walk acceleration value, WhyDo is able to make Steve dash backwards the same distance as a roll, while keeping the player in full control of his actions, allowing Steve to safely answer any incoming attacks from his opponent.
Due to each character having a different walk acceleration value, the Whivot can only be effectively performed by Steve and Joker, giving them a defensive advantage over the entire cast. However, due to mechanical difficulty of the technique on a traditional Gamecube controller, WhyDo recommends using an arcade box controller, which has drawn additional ire from the community towards both Steve and the controller’s legality in tournament.
The Whivot tech mirrors past Smash games’ movement techniques of Wavedashing in Melee and Perfect Pivoting in Smash 4, both of which are important at the highest levels of play and raised characters in tier lists with their application. Luigi in Melee completely revolves around Wavedashing to cross the stage to compensate for his shorter effective range against the top tier characters, while Cloud in Smash 4 can safely space and charge his Limit gauge thanks to Perfect Pivoting.
In the hands of Steve, a character similar to Cloud who benefits the most when left alone to charge up a resource meter, the Whivot makes his defensive play even harder to break through. Steve can already literally wall out his opponents, frustrating opponents to no end and has previously led to calls for banning the character before he takes over tournaments due to the limitless ceiling of his moveset, like Bayonetta and Meta Knight in past Smash games.
Steve’s tournament-legal status continues to depend on each organizer’s choice, as no clear consensus has been globally met, but as more and more unique techniques continue to elevate Steve past his fellow fighters, the Smash community may push for more legality discussions sooner rather than later.
With the Whivot’s difficulty and box controller recommendation by WhyDo, many community members have already drawn parallels to TSM Leffen’s 2022 call for alternate controller bans, stating that it gives a technically unfair advantage to certain characters on the roster. Combined with Steve’s already impressive list of documented techniques and the creation of the Whivot, the community call for bans could be more justified than ever as more exclusive tech is researched and developed.
WhyDo continues to push the limits as the Smash community’s biggest Steve pioneer, with many affectionately named techniques such as EPIC, CRUD, and more discovered by him. As each shows yet another new way to cancel Steve’s moves or combo them into inescapable instant-kill combos, Steve continues to be one of the most powerful and impactful characters in Smash.
Whivots aren’t even the end of WhyDo’s research, as the content creator plans to introduce five more techniques to the community in the self-labeled “Week of Steve Buffs,” starting back on Sept. 28 and lasting until Oct. 4.
